Image annotation using multi-correlation probabilistic matrix factorization

The image-word correlation estimation is an essential issue in image annotation. In this paper, we propose a multi-correlation probabilistic matrix factorization (MPMF) algorithm for the correlation estimation. Different from the traditional solutions which treat the image-word correlation, image similarity and word relation independently or sequentially, in the proposed MPMF, these three elements are integrated together simultaneously and seamlessly. Specifically, we have derived two low-dimensional sets by conducting a joint factorization upon the word-to-image relation matrix, the image similarity matrix, and the word relation matrix to derive two low-dimensional sets of latent word factors and latent image factors. Finally, the annotation words of each untagged or noisily tagged image can be predicted by reconstructing the image-word correlations with the both derived latent factors. Experimental results on the Corel dataset and a Flickr image dataset show the superior performance of our proposed algorithm over the state-of-the-arts.